The PonyDry out of the Packaging
I hate washing my hair everyday, and to honestly don’t have the time to style it from wet to dry every morning, so when the PonyDry dropped onto my desk, I had to make a go of giving it a try. The PonyDry is a polyester sleeve that fits over your ponytail, meant to enable you to wash only your roots vs. your entire hair in one go. Anyone with longer than shoulder length hair can appreciate the idea surrounding this, as it’s not often that the ends of our hair are problematic with next day hair. The product promises to cut down both shower time, and hair styling time from 25 minutes to seven.
The first time fitting the PonyDry over my tail proved to be a little difficult. My hair is just past my collarbone, so it’s not too long, but it does seem long enough to fit into this sleeve. The sleeve seems to be able to accommodate quite a length of hair, as long as you can get it into a ponytail on the top of your head and stuff it in. The instructions are a pictoral vs. written directions but they were simple enough to understand. Note* I have layered hair which did make it a touch difficult to get every strand into the PonyDry. By the time I had successfully gotten my ponytail into the sleeve and wrapped on top of my head, I had already spent five minutes that could have been spent washing my hair in the shower. The next, slightly odd aspect: washing my hair with the PonyDry on it. I was nervous it would be difficult to wash out all of the shampoo, but by following the directions I was able to rinse out my hair without any issues.
Directions post-shower told me to wrap my hair in a towel and allow the towel to soak up exess water from my roots before blow drying. Both the instructions, and the quick tips on the PonyDry website suggest blow-drying while your dry pony is still wrapped up. I was able to get most of it dry, but the hair around the base of my ponytail is rather thick, making it difficult to dry anything but the outer area. When I removed the sleeve to tackle the rest of my styling job, I noticed that a good five inches of my ponytail was soaking wet. I then had to spend more time drying the hair that was meant to stay dry in the first place. When I was finished I noticed that there was one section of my hair that was not properly shampooed, either, but at this point, but I had spent so much time trying to dry my hair that I didn’t have enough time to go back and re-wash a separate section of my hair. Giving it a fair shake, I decided to try this out again, on another day.
The PonyDry in my hair. This was the tightest I was able to get it.
On my second try I was able to get all of my roots clean but I did encounter a more than wet ponytail again. My third (and final) try found me wrapping the PonyDry as tight as I possibly could to avoid a wet tail. The end result was a relatively dry ponytail, but my hair wasn’t in a condition that I would have been happy, or confident with.
At the end, the PonyDry seems to be a great idea with a rather odd execution. The reality of the situation is that this is a “one size fits all product” in a world filled with unique strands of hair on every single head. I’m pretty sure, from here on in, I’ll be sticking to dry shampoo to solve my next-day hair problems.
The Pony Dry is available online at PonyDry.com and retails for $19.99.
